Listening for the Unsaid

Overview: Cat 4 women's race, 5th of 11, 2 upgrade points. Open women's race, 14th, no points.

Lately, hills are an issue. Either I slide backward out of the pack when the terrain goes UP, or I arrive at the top with everyone else, except I'm breathing so hard you begin to suspect that I am actually a stranded fish crossed with a Hoover and improbably perched atop a bicycle.

So, when I scoped out Sunday's crit course, in which the approach to the finish line was a sharp turn, short steep hill, false flat, small rise to the line, I didn't know whether I could stick with the pack during the race or not. (After the sharp right turn to the downhill finish at Fork Shoals that caused my teammate so much grief, I was happy to see a straight wide uphill finish, though--- no matter how much it hurts.)

On the first lap here was the mental onversation:

Legs: Listen, you KNOW we hate this with the hills. Ow!

Me: Yeah, but we're doing it anyway. You GOTTA-there are ugrade points to be had here! I promise to downshift to the small ring and spin it like a berserk blender on the way up. OK?

Legs: Ow. Okay, FINE. If you're gonna be THAT way about it. HERE.

To my complete surprise, my legs stopped hurting and just climbed the hill. (Can this be progress? Lord, I sincerely hope so.) Over the course of the next few laps, I did spend some quality time gasping for air, but I was able to stay with the pack on the hill and use the downhill and the flat, sheltered backside of the course for recovery. There were a few good climbers who did their best to string things out and/or escape on the hill, but I was able to stick. I was VERY HAPPY with that outcome. At the end, I was positioned about fourth going into the climb, and I held off a hard-charging but tired climber for fifth place.

I completed the open women's race also. I stuck with the pack on the first lap, lost contact at 8 1/2 minutes (beginning of the hill on the second lap) and was lapped at 23:30 and 43:30. I heard that other people were lapped besides me, but I didn't see it happen. I was pretty tired, but I made a point of working the hill hard every time I came to it, and tried to use the sheltered backside of the course to stay ahead of the pack as much as possible.

"If you want to be ahead, act as though you are behind."

-Lao Tzu

I was encouraged and enthused by the last ABC criterium. Really? I rode a smart race, and I craftily followed the strongest woman in the field, and really, it just didn't seem that hard. So, over the ensuing week, I attacked my training with vigor... hitting every workout and even throwing in a few leg workouts in the gym. (meowmie, go ahead and snicker, because I know you can predict the rest of the story...)

Then I showed up to race on Saturday... only to find that the large team of inexperienced women... who showed up as two different teams last week... was now a single team. Worse, someone had explained tactics to them. (The team captain is a smart cookie, so although she wasn't very fit, she sat in the pack and coached the newest riders.)

The result: I got ganged up on by a team of four people who now knew how to use that to their advantage. My leg workouts over the course of the week left the fast-twitch muscles in my legs AWOL, so I wasn't capable of the short bursts of all-out speed you need for criterium racing.

R and I discussed it, and the smartest thing for me to do would have been to mark the fastest rider in the group (who lapped the field that day) and sit on her. (Translation: ride directly behind her, but don't do any work.) That would have guaranteed me second place.... assuming the opposing team was not smart enough to call that rider back to the pack.

And the result: I placed 6th of 7. And worse?? The other team now knows that tactics actually work. This encourages them. Whooooooooooooooops!

Lesson #2: Bike racing is fundamentally different from triathlon training (in which you need to go at a steady, consistent hard pace, and you don't necessarily need a top end, especially this early in the season.) From now on, No leg workouts before race weeks! I cared more about doing well at that early-season race than I wanted to admit to myself.

Rarely has a line from an old REM song been so appropriate.

I drove to the criterium race, feeling fine.

Lined up on the start line.

We started. Wha....? Why am I already behind.....? Aaaarrghhh!!! Within about thirty seconds I was gapped, struggling as hard as I could, and my heart rate was about 183. Whoops, when that happens, I have blown up. Okay, fine. I went hard again.... and blew up again.

A lady standing on the sidelines yelled, "The woman ahead of you is five seconds up, Gail. Catch her and work with her!"

Who the hell is that, I thought. Why is she giving me advice? "Shut..... UP," I snarled. I do not need advice from the peanut gallery.

Seven or eight laps later, I had had it. I got off the course, leaned my bike against my car, and went back to the DS (team director, who very kindly loaned me her helmet) so she could show me how to take it off.

Oh my God. I turned around and looked.... and my teammate was on the ground, crashed, and not moving. Two of my teammates went down in that crash, and one crashed on the backside of the course. No!

There was the long, agonizing wait for the ambulance, and the wait while she got loaded into the ambulance. (We later found out that she had a laceration on her face and a broken collarbone, but was otherwise okay. Thank God.) I went back to my car and.... there was a large, bike-shaped hole in the air where my bike used to be. Gone. Sto-len. Gone. No bicycle.

No! Not that! Anything but that!

Erk....

So the plan is:

File police report (tomorrow).
Check pawnshops (tomorrow).
The aforesaid team director, very kindly, will call all the local bike shops, because she knows people there, and tell them it has gone missing and what it looks like.
In the meantime, I will see if anyone has a frame my size, that they are not using, that I could borrow.

This is not the horrible disaster it might be, because I have a time trial bike that I can strip (that is, take the components off it and put them on a racing frame). I will still need to buy some parts (like handlebars) and get the bike built, and probably get it fit to me.

Bad day.

Oh, and the lady yelling irritating advice from the sidelines? That was the teammate who graciously agreed to coach me, and who was, in fact, helping me. Ooooh, way to start out the coach-trainee relationship on the right note. Oooh, you should have seen me act sheepish when I figured THAT out.

sigh...

Race: Dilworth Criterium (an open women's race, containing categories pro, 1, 2, 3, 4; 4 is the lowest, for beginners, and yes, I'm a 4).

The fun started in the minivan on the way, when the Victory Brewing van pulled up next to us. (Victory Brewing is a national-level team who brought two women to the race today.) That caused an instant anxious attack for my two teammates (category 2 and 3 racers, respectively). Oh yeah, and Quark was there. (Same deal-- the Quark team also races nationally).

Yipe. I. Am planning. To line. Up. With them. Okay honey, just so we're clear on this, you really ARE willing to get your butt kicked today..... right?

Right.

To make a long story short, I fell off the back in the first lap. I got into a little chase group of four women who were probably all cat 4s like me; we were lapped twice by the faster women.

But:

1) I can tell the organized training I've been doing is paying off; I felt strong and fast compared to my little chase group, and I was the fastest climber in that little group. At the end of the 45-minute race, I did not feel nuked.

2) At the end, I was 17th of 20, and I outclimbed my little chase group to finish before they did.

3) And, once again, I made a Dumb Move: Because I climbed faster than the other three riders with me, when the announcer called a prime just for our little group, I positioned myself first up the hill.... to no avail, because they stuck with me. Okay, I figured, I will outsprint them and win this $30 prime.

Nope. Not even. The #2 lady right behind me beat me to it. I still gotta work on my sprint.

In today's circuit race, I:

- Kept my heart rate pretty much at or above 175
- Got dropped, but did not get lapped
- Arrived in time to get a two-lap warmup in
- Won the cat 4 women's race, competing against the same other woman who was there yesterday.

Not bad.

After the race, a couple of the more knowledgeable guys gave me a great hint, which was: When going up the hill repeatedly, don't drop to a higher gear and kill your legs. Spin up the hill the first few times. Save the leg-muscle-mangling low-gear activity for later in the race, when you might need it to fend someone off.

Good tip. Accordingly, here are my new goals:

- Hill workout on Tuesday.
- Lactate threshold intervals on Thursday.
- Race on Sunday.
(a) Arrive by 8:15, which means leaving the house at 7 AM
(b) spin the hill the first few times
(c) Keep a high heart rate and a positive attitude the whole time.

I tried out my new cross bike today. Wow, that was a trip. it's a very stiff frame, so we shot off the line and the bike seemed to zooooom out from under me. I had to pedal like crazy to keep up with the bike... and I was in 2nd, then faded to 4th when I rode partway up a small run-up and THEN decided to run it. (Duh!)

Things were good until the middle of lap 2-- I was a very happy camper, albeit a happy trying-not-to-puke camper, when I tried to outsprint another lady on a loose, gravelly part of the course. I tried a late, sharp turn that would have been fine on my MTB... but the 'cross bike needs more expertise in terrain like that... and I promptly ate it.

I got up, and 10% of my head went "KEEP GOING! THEY'RE GETTING AWAY! as several people passed me. Unfortunately, 50% of my head was busy trying to figure out if it was still attached to my neck, and the rest of my head was trying to remember the questions to ask in a situation like this. (What's your name, where are you, what's the day and date-- if you can answer those questions, you are oriented to person, place, and time, and therefore can be considered roughly okay.)

D'oh!

Accordingly, I stood for a moment trying to make sure that I was fine (Yes, I think I banged my head a bit; I looked later, and my stylish helmet with pink flames has a few dents), decided I was bloody well going to finish, and took off... wobbling slightly, and bleeding from a slice on my elbow. It took me about half a lap to think about going race pace again, but I took the last lap at reasonable speed and did my best to sprint at the end.

I did finish.
The leader did not lap me, thank God. (Some of the C men did, but not all of them.)
I love the bike, but clearly, I need more practice on it!

The lady I was dueling with came to find me after the race ended to see if I was okay. Robin, for that was her name, said she was trying to get me to work with her so we could bridge up to the leaders. (Duh, that did not occur to me, and it bloody well should have!) I said as much to her, and I think I may have made a buddy for next time.

Off to scrub out my elbow...

It rained today. Before the ACE speedway race, I kept getting mental pictures of people crashing. Now, it could be my nervous brain making up stories, or my brain could be right about what is going to happen, and I'd better pay attention. I decided to race, and I stuck in for the first fifteen (eighteen?) minutes of racing, getting soaking wet and increasingly nervous in process; then my glasses fogged up and I was completely blind. That was it; without conscious thought, I rolled out of the peleton. I took a few cooldown laps, then discovered that I could see clearly if I squeegeed the lenses with my thumb and forefinger. I started to regret DNFing.... and then, on the last lap, someone did crash.

If I'd stayed in, I might not have been anywhere near the guy who crashed when it happened... but you never know.

Well, that didn't work out the way I thought it would.

I was picturing the same ten women as yesterday, racing around a six-cornered criterium race in downtown Raleigh, NC. (We were to do laps for 25 minutes.) For some reason, I pictured this race as "flat". It was not, in fact, "flat". More like two uphills and no appreciable downhills. I am not quite sure how race organizers managed that one.

Recall that hills are not one of my strong points (yet).

We lined up; it was 25 minutes; I hopped on Amber's wheel (Amber won the road race yesterday with a breakaway on the one big hill of the course) and refused to be budged. She was in front ("pulling"), and naturally she wanted someone else to be out in the wind pulling for a while, so she swerved back and forth trying to get someone else to shoot forward and volunteer.

Not me. I ain't biting. I let her pull. She was unhappy about that, but apparently she wasn't willing to slow down enough for someone she considered a real threat to pass her. She stayed in front, and about halfway through, she and another woman made a break for it. The next three of us worked together to try to catch them, but to no avail.

By twenty minutes in, I was done-- nuked-- baked. I fell off the little group of three and limped in. Then, on the last lap, I flatted and had to walk back. Ah, the angst.

Ah well. Next time.

I raced my first crit at the Ace Speedway in Altamahaw last night.

Background: A criterium race generally involves a lot of laps around a square or rectangular course, so if you are in the back of the pack, you speed up slow down speed up slow down speed up etc. as the pack of cyclists turns corners. Much better to stay in the front... if you can. This one was held on an oval racetrack, so you could really push it in the corners if you could hold the line. (That is... stay on the line of travel you picked out). But, as with all cycling, if you can stay with the pack you let their draft (the wind they create) help you. If you fall off the back or ride in the vary front, you have to work harder.

I raced the C race at 6:30 PM, with the Category 5 (beginner) men, unattached racers (anyone not on a racing team) and women. There were about thirty of us. We were going for thirty minutes.

To top it off, we now meet again Chris, of bike shop fit fame. He showed up to ride the B race (after mine) and promptly donated $10 for a cash prime for my race. (a prime means a lap prize, so whoever wins the lap after the prime is announced wins the prime.) He said he wanted to see a little action and excitement. I think it was maybe kind of sadistic to announce the prime on the first lap of our race, but hey, what do I know. ;-)

All right people: I can ride a hundred miles and not really notice. I can ride fifty miles fast and not really notice. But this thirty minute crit, where I had to match speeds (25 mph) with everyone else, kicked my butt. (I fell off twice.... by which I mean, I got left behind by the pack and let them lap me, then hopped back in the pack when they came around again... and apparently I did really well for a first timer. Most newcomers don't finish the thirty minutes.

I finished and rode a few laps to cool down. I was about to ride back to Elon, where my car was parked, but two of the bike shop guys fussed at me. One of them finally quashed my objections by loaning me his sweats, then drove me home after the B race ended. (with that much fussing, I am not going to object. I will smile and say thank you and watch the B race.)

I went home and drooled on my monitor a little. I ate a big salmon steak, then went to bed early, and got up still feeling slightly droolish. I wasn't sore today, but I was definitely tired.

Bottom line: goal achieved. I have now entered and finished a bike race. Next goal: hang with the pack the whole time. I figure I should be able to do that by the end of this module.

I'm very pleased to report that I'm the Oklahoma Masters Women's 30-39 State Cyclocross Champion. (Later in this race report, I will confess exactly how many women were racing in the 30-39 age group that day. ;-)

I would like to note that there are no women's A, B, or C categories in Oklahoma. There is a women's race, and it lasts for 45 minutes. Period. I think I just upgraded from C's without meaning to. ;-)

Kurt Egli, who invited me to race in OKC on my way across the country, was adamant about two things: One, I could not possibly stay in a motel on I-40, because it was too dangerous, and two, once I was safely ensconced in a decent hotel on the Northwest Expressway, I could not possibly ride my bike the 1.7 miles to the race site, because I'd get killed in traffic. (I forebore to tell Kurt about the ratbag motels I've stayed in without incident all over Europe, and in every other city along I-40 that I needed to stop in on this trip. The latter may have been ratbag central, hazardous to life and limb, but they had one defining virtue: I could park the 30-foot-long U-haul and car trailer at them without having to back it up to get in or out.)

I'll spare you the logistical adventures involved in getting the U-haul and trailer to the middle of Oklahoma City. I did eventually make it to the hotel to park the thing; I would have spent a lot of time swearing while I repeatedly got lost, but my old coach has been a great influence on me; every time I open my mouth to swear, these days, I hear the guy in my head: "There are better ways to express yourself."

I can't argue. He has a point. A good point. So I grit my teeth, and say to myself, in the dryest and most long-suffering tone I can possibly manage, "That was not what I wanted to do." So... if you hear that in this race report, you will know that I was really thinking, "#$!!@&*$##!"

Right then. On to the actual race. I arrived with every warm clothing item I own-- and if necessary Kurt's wife Shelly would have loaned me more-- prepared for howling winds and blizzards and freezing temperatures, because my Dad grew up in Oklahoma and he assures me that there are freezing blizzards there 90% of the time, except in summer, when it's 115 degrees out. Nope! On race day, the weather was 65 degrees and sunny.... with a nice 25 MPH headwind. Hmm.

No sooner did I arrive, strip my sweats and show Velo Bella colors, than Megan Long showed up. (She was last year's Juniors national cross champion, I believe, and she lives in the area.) She promptly wanted to know if I was whichever Bella beat her handily at Sea Otter last year. Whoever it was-- and I didn't recognize your name when she said it-- she remembers you _very clearly_, and she may even still have nightmares about you. (Congratulations, whoever you were. I take it you kicked some serious butt at Sea Otter. Way to go!)

Pre-race, we all took a parade lap. This translates "Everyone slowly rides the course in a big group." Whatever-- it was a chance to see the course, which was asphalt or dead grass and flat with a few tiny dips through dry streambeds, The most interesting parts of it were (1) numerous sharp crit-style turns and (2) the 1/4th of it that went straight into the constant headwind. There were only two sets of barriers.

Well, I did fine on the steepest dry streambed during my practice lap, but in trying to avoid someone else in the streambed during the parade lap, I unweighted the front wheel on the steep uphill, and my bike went right while I went left. Wham!

That was not what I wanted to do. Also, it hurt.
The A race went off (about 12 guys), then the Mens' Masters race at 2 PM, then the women's race at 2:10. There were six women TOTAL racing. My lack of time on the bike came back to haunt me: Megan was off the front like a shot, her stepmother was right behind her, and I was duking it out for third until I locked up my front brake at the first set of barriers and nearly flipped the bike and myself in one giant chain-grease-covered somersault.

#3 woman said, "Those are some brakes!" before vanishing into the distance. Damn, damn, damn! No, wait... Uh... That... was not... what I wanted to do. I frantically worked the pedals forward and backward, got the chain loosened, remounted, and kept going. I did all right until I got to the killer headwind section of the course. It was flat; traction was great; there were no sharp turns; I should be able to hammer. Nope! You'd think that a headwind would feel about like a wicked uphill, but it doesn't, and I'm at a loss to explain the difference; all I could do was put my head down, and growl my way through it. (The people who routinely race and train in that wind have my respect; they must get monster strong from it.)

On a later lap, I came to the second set of barriers and fell, then got up, cleared the barriers, put my bike back down, and discovered that I'd locked the chain up.

Once again, that was not what I wanted to do.

A moment of frantic effort, jockeying the pedal back and forth to loosen the chain (Thanks, Heather Kirkby, for that little trick!) and it was back on, and I was moving again. But on the fourth lap, as I cleared the second set of barriers, a race official looked up from his clipboard at me and casually asked, "Are you racing?" (You know it, I know it: to a Velo Bella, this is worse than a woman saying to a man, "Is it in yet?") In between gasps, I looked up at him, trying to get my remaining three neurons to remember his face-- I wanted to come back later and beat him to death with my front wheel. In those situations, you gotta remember the guy's face accurately-- it's really embarrassing when you maim the wrong person. "Yes", I gasped, trying not to die of oxygen starvation then and there. "Oh no," he replied, "I meant the guy behind you."

That didn't make it any better.

Six laps later, I was still in fourth, and #5 was still 100 yards behind me, and #6 was 100 yards behind her. On one of the hairpin turns of lap #5, though, I saw Kurt. He saw me. That does it, said my brain. DO NOT LET HIM LAP YOU. You will never hear the end of it, even when it comes down to you versus Kurt in wheelchair races in the nursing home. GOT THAT?

I got that. I held him off, and he did not lap me. I am happy to report that I made it through the whole 45 minutes without further incident, and when they'd handed out medals to the first three finishers, they determined that #4, 5, and 6 were in the 30-39, 40-49, and 50-59 age groups respectively, so we each became the state champions for our respective age groups. I got to pick an item from the box of prize schwag, and someone handed me a gold medal and a cold beer. (That would be cyclocross, Okie style.)

Next up: If my school schedule allows, I will find a NC race and race that.